Waging War after 1989

Last update: 2025-01-21 15:29:39

 

If war is often only the continuation of politics by other means, to understand war is of necessity to understand politics. To speak about war after the fall of the Berlin Wall thus means to narrate, to reflect upon and to think about the history of this epoch.

Before the fall of the Berlin Wall we had a bipolarisation of the world, two universalist ideologies and two opposing empires which were unable to engage in direct war thanks to the balance of terror. Europe was cut in two. The European colonial empires had disappeared, giving way to a Third World divided between those in favour of the Soviet Union, those in favour of the USA, and non-aligned nations. In addition to the war in Korea and the war in Vietnam numerous peripheral conflicts also raged.

The fall of the Soviet Union put an end to these indirect confrontations. The world became unipolar. The American empire was the first in history to be able to define itself, without exaggeration, as universal. After the fall of its rival it engaged in the initiative of a ‘new world order’[1] which involved making this empire really universal. For a generation the whole world experienced a certain conformation to the economic, political and cultural norms of the United States of America. The policies and the wars of this epoch were first and foremost American policies and wars and then, as a reaction, anti-American policies and wars.

At first (1989-2001) the normalisation seemed unstoppable. There was the striking manifestation of power of the first Gulf War (1990-1991) and the wars of the disintegration of Yugoslavia (Bosnia 1992-1995 and Kosovo 1999). Subsequently, (2001-?), after the 9/11 attacks in New York, the military commitment became more sizeable and permanent (Afghanistan, 2002-?; Iraq, 2003-2012, 2014-?; Libya, 2011-?; Syria, 2011-?), despite the fact that increasingly strong forms of resistance obstructed the imperial policy.

Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall this liberal empire lost the initiative. A concert of nations steadily reappeared, placing a weakened power in front of the difficult choice between silent abdication in face of a multi-polarity seen to be inevitable, a restoration of power and/or a capacity to create a new network which would allow a new American century.

 

The United States of the World

 

The question of war becomes clear if one considers the goal of the State which during the period we are examining in this article took the initiative. The Idea was pointed out by Hegel:[2] to achieve freedom not through a civil state founded upon the identification of the individual with the People, the Nation or the State but through the individualistic preservation of the (Lockean) state of nature, a soft state of nature which does not take the Hobbesian form. This Idea (if it is not mixed with classical culture and Christianity) is reverse Communism. For Communism everything is public; for the Idea everything is private. Property, politics, culture, morality and religion know only individuals, their liberties, their rights and their contracts. From the privatisation of good comes a universal privatisation. This Idea increases its potential of universalisation thanks to: a) technology that places all the parts of the world in relationships with each other and in communication with each other; b) the reaction to totalitarianism; and c) the seduction of the dream of a state of nature which might be not Hobbesian and which might suppress evil (prosperity, peace, freedom, the enlightened…thanks to the free market, human rights and liberal democracy).

At the end of the expansion of this idea we find the United States of the World. During the first stage: rather oligarchic regimes in each state and international solidarity between these oligarchies in order to control the transition. But the general growth of prosperity would allegedly reduce frustrations, aggression and war. Militarism would give way to doux commerce, democratisation would be widespread and peace would become universal, regulated by a single liberal and secular ideology, the guarantor of tolerance.

 

The Reduction of War

 

According to this Idea in its pure form the role of war is very much reduced. First of all it is no longer the ordinary right of States starting with the treaty that established the United Nations. What has an action involving armed force become? Either a crime of aggression or legitimate defence against such aggression, or an action involving force decided by chapter seven of the Charter of the United Nations to impose a resolution of the Security Council. Ideally, legitimate defence is only a provisional reaction destined to be replaced by the collective action of the restoration of peace.[3]

A collective action involving defence can acquire an offensive form by becoming a ‘right to interference’ or a ‘responsibility to protect’ when individual rights are violated by a government inside its own jurisdiction. These governments are therefore no longer legitimate. The unjust party that resorts to (aggressive) war loses its public character and is reduced to being an association of malefactors with whom, theoretically, the question of negotiating does not even arise – the point is only to try them and punish them. In this sense, war no longer exists for law because it presupposes a political order made up of a plurality of independent political entities. The political powers of the new world order (theoretically) are no longer anything else but regional administrations subordinated to a sort of nascent universal state. In this international political community, the only sovereign power that exists must be sub-divided in a democratic way.

The disproportion between the enormous resources brought into play to combat terrorism and the almost ghostly presence of terrorism in the West, even though always present in the mass media, is surprising

Logically, there derives from this a ‘policing’ concept of military action. One is no longer dealing with imposing one’s own will on a political adversary but, rather, of imposing obedience to international law and punishing a rebel or a delinquent. The ordinary combatants of the ‘wrong side’, who should know which is the right side, no longer have a right to the moral immunity of the combatant. They, too, like their leaders, must appear before a court of law.[4] Universal privatisation also leads to the end of conscript armies and thus to the professionalization and privatisation of the military function, with resort to the mercenaries of private military companies.[5]

 

Abuse of the Just War

 

In the American military world and in NATO, reference to Aristotle and attachment to a serious ethical norm have remained rather alive,[6] like, indeed, theories of a just war, and logically connected with the theory of human rights but utilised as an apology for American imperialism. This forces the classic theory of the just war, founded upon the idea of a common good of mankind, to be relativised.

This universal common good cannot justify an imperialist interpretation because it requires, for various reasons,[7] the existence of various independent political entities. It is thus contradictory to argue that the management of the universal common good requires a universal political power (and an empire and its imperialism). However, the idea of the universal common good requires that each independent political authority takes into account the ‘function of peace’ or ‘imperial function’[8] (the administration of the common good). Moreover, this common good itself does not exclude wider forms of organisation (alliances, stable unions of states and nations), on the condition that subsidiarity is safeguarded and political plurality preserved.

A ‘policing’ concept of military action has emerged. One is no longer dealing with imposing one’s own will on a political adversary but, rather, of imposing obedience to international law and punishing a rebel or a delinquent

There is a surprising parallelism between the thought of Vitoria and the empire of Charles V, and between the development of the theories of human rights and the just war and the American empire. Where they are abused, the theories of human rights and the just war provide a pretext for any aggression. A fair judgement must thus distinguish in history between: a) what derives from a reasonable exercise of the imperial function of a more important power which, because of urgency and circumstances, is invested with universal responsibilities, in the presence, for example, of objectively intolerable violations of human rights; b) what is only an abusive manoeuvre which allows the oppression of independent sovereignties and employs the pretext of the common good. The absolute power that ‘corrupts absolutely’, as Lord Acton put it,[9] is nothing else but imperial power. National plurality is the fundamental form of the separation of powers in mankind, a separation without which no political freedom could exist.

 

Pacifist Theory, Warlike Practice

 

Theoretically pacifist and determined in the long term to put an end to war, the ambitious policy of the new world order led in reality to the creation of apparently unparalleled military apparatus as a result of unprecedented military expenditure.

This super-armament led at the same time to disproportionate quantitative increases, something that was already notable during the Cold War, and a qualitative mutation of the technology of armaments through the application of ICT and robotic knowledge. This influenced all the sectors of military activity: command, communications, surveillance, intelligence, precision in attacks…The revolution continued with nanotechnologies, robotics, digitalisation of the battle field, the miniaturisation of robots – influencing military culture, increasing the distance between the aggressor and his enemy, and at times being reduced to zero for one of the adversaries. This fact, together with the ‘policing-style’ and judicial conception to which allusion has been made, has transformed the warrior into an executioner. He engages in a series of summary capital executions decided in secret by the executive without parliamentary or judicial control. The kill list is established by the intelligence services who have information that is ‘extorted’ through instruments that often include torture.[10] Targeted murders involve ‘collateral damage’ and make populations live in fear. Emphasis on ethics and law and the theory of the ‘legalisation’ of the use of force become derisory. This revolution in military affairs (which began in the 1980s) was, paradoxically, consistent with the minimalist idea of war. The American forces in 1999 in Kosovo did not suffer losses. The technological revolution was to have allowed wars without deaths and therefore without heroism and without sacrifice, something similar to a well-organised policing operation. The aim was also to put an end to independent nuclear weapons and the offensive doctrine of their tactical employment by the liberal Empire, which was justified by a theory of just preventive war, was established.

 

The Utility of the Enemy

 

Given this crushing superiority, during the twenty years that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall nobody apart from Saddam Hussein ventured a classic clash with the imperial power. This was the epoch of asymmetrical wars, remakes of colonial wars and decolonisation, with resort to terrorism and the fight against terrorism.[11] The very phrase ‘counter-insurrection’ expressed an imperial approach according to which the enemies were the rebels (insurgents) against the new world order. Terrorism was above all Islamist. What the wars waged by the USA or by NATO (Iraq 1, 2 and 3, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria) had in common was the fact that they all took place in lands with a Muslim tradition. The disproportion between the enormous resources brought into play to combat terrorism and the almost ghostly presence of terrorism in the West, even though always present in the mass media, is surprising. This paradox can be explained by the efficiency of the intelligence services which were capable of preventing most of the terrorist attacks. Sed contra, one can ask why, if the West is so strong, these wars carry on for so long.

Other explanations can be proposed. First and foremost, conserving an adversary in chaos can be a political objective. Secondly, anxiety-inducing Islamism, in part fabricated, has two functions, according to whether one refuses or accepts engaging in a rational calculation and entering the game of the empire. 1) If it rejects, NATO declares war, a war which in the eyes of public opinion justifies mass rearmament whose purpose is not the fight against terrorism but world power. 2) If it accepts, one acts as a guard dog and a convenient ally against the potential rivals of the empire. Something that allows a weakening and intimidation of Europe, Russia, India and China. This was how Richelieu exploited and at the same time fought the Protestants. ‘Anti-terrorist’ wars have worked to the advantage of the empire through super-armament, the installation of bases in the world (over seven hundred), the survival of the dollar and the control of energy. Anarchy in loco can be collateral damage or a secondary objective.

 

The Weapon of ‘Normalisation’

 

Despite this military hyperactivity the Idea of empire remains fundamentally pacific. The principal instrument of normalisation has to be the growth of prosperity through the free market which leads to democratisation. War is only a use of surgical instruments to facilitate the birth of the society of the future which will arrive because of the effect of historical determinism (which is first and foremost economic in character). Conflicts in Muslim regions must not, therefore, make us forget that oil and rear alliances are only means to achieve an end – the normalisation of the world according to the Idea of empire. By normalisation one should not understand conquest or occupation because the empire wants to be liberal but, rather, achieving the conformity of the economy, politics and culture of the rest of the world to the rules of liberalism.

The Idea of empire remains fundamentally pacific. The principal instrument of normalisation has to be the growth of prosperity through the free market which leads to democratisation. War is only a use of surgical instruments to facilitate the birth of the society of the future

To ‘conquer’ the others, the empire trusts in the modernising effect of mentalities favoured by the spread of sciences, technologies and the liberal economy. From economic alignment and the spread of information must come, first, the wish for, and then the reality of, a liberal cultural normalisation, and then a political democratisation (which is liberal and based on the mass media). All anomalous regimes will fall under the pressure of this need for democratisation. This policy is considered irresistible, in the same way as the appeal of the American way of life, individual freedom and political democracy… are held to be irresistible.

When war can no longer take place where it usually takes place because of dissuasion, it tends to invade those spaces which it does not normally penetrate. It is for this reason that the Chinese coined the concept of ‘unrestricted warfare’[12] which postulates an overturning of the formula of Clausewitz – ‘Politics is only war continued by other means’. The policy of normalisation through doux commerce is nothing else but war (by conquest) pursued with means that are not military means. It means waging ‘war without war’, even though it has the goal of one day achieving universal peace.

For that matter, those regimes that delay too much in allowing themselves to be normalised can also be overthrown with intelligent techniques. Political war replaces war with subversion: acquiring a party of the adversary, winning elections by providing money, mass media support, skills, and special bodies. ‘Unlimited war’ is successful above all against small states but fails elsewhere because of nuclear dissuasion, the decreasing control of public opinion due to internet, and the erosion of the image of liberalism (unemployment and inequality are by now attributed to the free market and post-modern culture).

The Failures of Empire

 

If the action engaged in is not sophisticated, it leads to failures that compromise the project of the ‘new world order’. The first failure of the Empire has been the survival of the Chinese regime which, despite its evident defects, seems to the Chinese to be the guarantor of the independence of their nation. In addition, the modernisation of mentalities through the economy and technology has not led to liberalism but, rather, and above all else, to nationalism, which has also been exacerbated in Japan, India, Vietnam and Korea, and which in Asia has generated a naval race and tensions between nations. The Empire can play with these tensions but the rise of forms of nationalism has marked the failure of individualist normalisation.

Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall this liberal empire lost the initiative. A concert of nations steadily reappeared, placing a weakened power in front of the difficult choice between silent abdication in face of a multi-polarity seen to be inevitable, a restoration of power and/or a capacity to create a new network

The second failure of the Empire was the re-election of Vladimir Putin; the third, the management of the Arab Spring. It was interpreted as an opportunity to modernise control over the Muslim world by replacing military dictators with the Muslim Brothers. On paper a manoeuvre in grand style; at the level of facts a fiasco brought about by the hostility and the incompetence of that organisation, as well as the reticence of certain allies.

In these conditions one cannot but observe a strange parallelism between the European situation in 1914 and the global situation of 2014. Now as then an empire is marooned. New powers are emerging. A cultural renewal is expressed whereas the dominant ideology is falling into abjection. New blocs have been formed. In this new context war as we knew it in 1989 will necessarily give way to inter-State conflicts in a form that is not classic but still largely unpredictable.

 

 

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